A writer-mom's life is filled with a million and two distractions; sometimes she finds herself at the park, WRITING ON THE SIDEWALK

Don’t Fear The Revision

After taking a break for a few months I am back to revising my current Work in Progress. During my break I had the opportunity to find many great thoughts, plots and ideas on revision. I will be sharing some of these ideas for the rest of this week.

Writing is not a perfect process, especially for me. My current picture book “Grandma’s Pear Tree” went through four revisions before I felt it was ready for submission. Once submitted, my story then went through two more major revisions before it became the story it is today.

Author Ellen Potter describes the revision process as a view from a boulder:

The View from the Boulder

Writing your first draft is like taking a long, meandering hike through unfamiliar countryside. You don’t quite know where you’re going. You pass through crummy little towns that turn out to be captivating, walk down promising roads only to discover that they’re dead ends. You keep taking wrong turns and have to backtrack and start all over again.

At the end of the hike (or sometimes when you are only partway through), you perch yourself on a huge boulder. From that height, you can look down at all the places you have been and can see where you got lost and where you found your way again. The view from the boulder gives you perspective.

When you are ready to revise your story, you are sitting on that boulder.

You need to have the view from the boulder to really see what your story looks like and to figure out how to make it better.

I think this is a great way to look at it. As I sit perched on that boulder looking at my story I can now see areas that need to be changed, some characters won’t survive, some will get stronger and events will suddenly disappear. My hope is, in the end, I will have a better and stronger story, it may just take me a few revisions to get it that way.